Arena Options Limited is committed to involving service users in decisions about how it spends its money. Through its resident involvement strategy Arena Options supported by St Helens Housing Association Trust fund will provide each service panel with its own budget to further its aims. This budget will be used to fund Service Panel grants, which will fund activities that are considered to be beyond the Association’s legal responsibility as a landlord.
The current priorities for this grant programme are:
- Community Initiatives
Funding for community projects or facilities such as youth activities, equipment, events, causes, campaigns or projects that may help to benefit communities where Arena Options owns and manages properties.
- Estate or Property Improvements
Estate or property improvements such as security lighting, environmental improvements and so on. The emphasis would be on things that are new or additional, not replacing existing which the Arena Asset has resources for.
- Residents Associations
To fund day to day running costs of the association.
The Service Panel Grants Group
Each of the Arena Options service areas will have a service panel made up of residents, staff and Board members from within that service area. Each panel will be expected to oversee the administration of requests for service panel grants for residents and service users within their service area.
Service Area Panels role within regard administration of grants:
- To agree priorities for spending against the Service Panel grant for their area
- To agree the processes for the spending
- To agree the application forms to be used ( in conjunction with other service area panels)
- To discuss how to publicise the fund within their service area externally to residents and groups
- To look at ways of levering in other money to supplement the budget (this could be done at time of application)
- To report on spending to the overall Options Residents Panel and St Helens Housing Association
- Trust and to include an End of Year Budget Report
- To receive reports from Finance and Project Teams
- To produce an annual report to the Board
- To operate within Financial Standing Orders
- To be accountable to residents through publicising achievements.
- To highlight any trends to other departments within the Arena Group
- To make recommendations to the Board to address any issues
Applications can be presented throughout the year. The service panels Group will meet every three months to consider applications that have been received up to 14 days prior to the meeting. If an application is approved for an item of a capital nature toward the end of the financial year, it may be necessary to fund this from the following year’s budget.
To apply for a Service Grant Application, please download and complete the application form
here. Please return the form to either
options@arena-housing.com or Arena Options QPC Team, Harsdshaw House, Tolver Street, St Helens, Merseyside, WA10 1EW.